Jan Carson
speaker
829 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 14 May
Jan Carson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I would call these almost haunted islands.
And for me as a writer, they work as kind of extended metaphors.
There's a line where someone says the far side is the space where we've dumped all of the stuff we don't want to deal with after the troubles.
And so we've four main islands, an island of almost deads who are people kind of caught in a limbo between life and death.
We have an amazing island that I want in my house that swallows anything you dump on it.
So that's been a repository for everything from guns to pornography to body parts over the years.
And then I think the two islands for me that are probably most disturbing are actually the ones that are based on real things.
So Margaret Atwood, when she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, talked about how, you know, there's nothing in that book that hasn't happened somewhere in the world at some stage to women.
And there are two islands, one called Tom's Hard, which you've already referred to, which is a suicide island.
a space where you can come to conveniently take your own life.
And that's based on the Japanese suicide forest, Aogahara, which I read about a few years ago and thought, this is so deeply sad, but also it says something about society and where we are.
that something as dreadful as suicide could be made convenient.
And I wanted Tom's heart to really speak to the horrific suicide statistics we've had in the north since the troubles.
So I think we're about five and a half thousand people have taken their own lives since 98.
And then the second of those islands is Middle Flat, where the sleepers live.
And the sleepers are these women who have kind of gone into a comatose state because the trauma they've been through has just proved too much for them.
And once again, that's based on a real syndrome called resignation syndrome, which has been witnessed in places like Scandinavia and Australia, mostly in refugees who fled Australia.
kind of war-torn spaces and arrived in relative peace and their bodies have just suddenly been able to relax and they'll go to sleep for months and months.
So that felt like it could be something that might have happened here, particularly with a lot of the women during the Troubles.
As I point out in the book, carried a lot of the kind of psychological weight and the trauma of what was happening to their husbands and their children and their fathers and them as well.
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